It’s a mouthful, but iTree-The Original Christmas Tree is a good holiday app for creating custom postcards. The images are done in a flat, cartoon-like style, but it looks nice. You are presented with an empty tree to decorate and toolbars allowing you to choose a surprising large variety of ornaments to hang on it. While you are decorating your tree, snow falls in the background, and you have the option of listening to a Christmassy tune. The music is nice, but gets repetitive if you spend any time in the app. I eventually turned it off.

The toolbar also gives you selections for choosing a day or night background, or for automatically choosing a random assortment of ornaments for the tree if you want to send a quick card. Shaking the iPhone/iPod Touch drops all the ornaments off the tree if you want to start over. Once you are finished with your iTree, turning your device into landscape position turns your tree into a scenic postcard, offering you a place to type your holiday message and a send button. Rather than creating a snapshot of the tree to send with the Mail app, the app connects to a server and creates a web link which you then email to the recipient. Before doing this, you are presented with a dialog asking permission to connect to the company’s servers.

I’m not sure why it requires a server connection, but it seems harmless. I’d prefer if it just saved the image to my photo library. On the other hand, it is nice that the app hands you off to the Mail app right away. I also wish there was an option to play my own music in the background, or some additional music besides the one built-in tune. It is nice that you can select a large variety of ornaments and can populate the tree with a lot of ornaments, but some people with larger fingers may have trouble controlling the relatively small ornaments. Generally, once I “picked-up” an ornament, my finger covered it sufficiently that I couldn’t quite tell where I was putting it. There are certain ‘hooks’ on the tree where ornaments can attach, and sometimes I would miss and the ornament would just fall off the bottom of the screen. The auto-poulate button can help work around that. If you get really wrapped up in it, you can spend a lot of time decorating one tree.

Overall I like the app. It is a nice experience to create a custom card to send. The extra little effects like the animated snow and the music helped get into the Christmas mood.

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A Real Tree is a simple little app — it just displays a animated tree. But behind that tree is a little bit of environmental charity.

The developers of A Real Tree have pledged to plant a tree for each copy of A Real Tree sold in one of 12 countries including:

Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Burundi, Senegal, Zambia, India, Philippines, and Haiti.

You can keep track of the number of trees on their web site. A Real Tree is a great idea and a great way to do a little something to fight deforestation in a rather novel way.

Comixology is the do all app for comics and graphic novel fans. Keep track of what’s getting released when, keep track of the ones you want to pull, listen to podcasts with industry insiders, and even view previews of some of the books.

With the built in shipping list, you can browse the releases and keep track of a list of books you want to buy. The app includes lists from the current week, the next week, and the previous week. Covers, descriptions, prices, are included for all items. Previews of a few pages are available for some. But more than just books are listed — related DVDs, posters, merchandise, etc. are also in the shipping list. Items you pull are listed in you pull list and can be synced to the Comixology website for reference there. In addition, you can view the comics pulled by others to see what’s popular.

There are also some great enhanced podcasts available to view. Updated every week and they focus on a featured industry person and you can listen to them right in the app without needing to download.

The included previews are great. When available for a title you can navigate the preview images just like you can in the built in photo app. Swipe left/right to change pages, pinch to zoom, etc. Overall the quality of the images is pretty good, but could be a little higher resolution.

If you are a fan of comics, this is a fantastic reference app with a good amount of original content included. For even the casual reader, this app provides some great info that may get you even more interested.

Spawn Illuminati is an iPhone version, with lots of extra features, of the old unix screen saver swarm. It’s a great little fun toy with no real function — other than to look at the pretty lights. I guess you could justify it as a background image generator — but that would be a stretch.

The interface is rather odd with this application. You swipe you finger in a particular direction to change the size of the lines, speed, etc. There’s a quick explanation of the controls shown when the app loads. In addition, the lines will follow your finger as you drag.

Here’s a Youtube video (in usual YouTube quality, yuck) that shows you what the app looks like. The actual app is higher resolution, more defined, and much smoother.

I must admit that I was ready to give this app a much higher rating but the value seems less than it was. The developer changed the price from $0.99 to $1.99 while I was reviewing it. Obviously developers are free to set their prices at what they want, it’s up to them. This is a well developed app, fun to play with, but you may grow bored with it quickly. Let’s see what the developer adds in the future.

This app isn’t produced by NetFlix, but it should be. It does a spectacular job of controlling all aspects of managing your NetFlix rentals. Not only does a good job, but it looks nice too!

The interface is very straightforward. Starting up the app for the first time prompts you to log into your NetFlix account. If you have multiple accounts, you can add them to the list on the first page and access each account individually. If you use one account all the time, you can set it to automatically log in every time you launch the application.

Other settings available include Fast Login which initially only loads part of your queue information to speed up login. There is also a Detailed Queue toggle, but I could not tell the difference when it was on or off. The Instant Queue toggle places an additional button at the top of your queue list, but gave me an error every time I tried to use it. Finally, there are toggles for telling the app when to load the graphics for the movie thumbnails, so that you can turn off images when you are on Edge or 3G if you want the pages to load more quickly.

Once iFlix logs you in, you are presented with your current movie queue. Movies are presented as clapboards with a miniature version of the movie’s poster inside. A nice touch. The first part of the movie’s description is also displayed, but pressing the blue “go to” icon slides to a page with the full description. There is an option to click on the poster icon to take you to the NetFlix website for the additional movie information it has such as cast listings and reviews. It does this with it’s own simple, built-in browser, rather than opening Safari.

Once you have visited the movie’s web page, additional icons appear underneath the movie’s title in your queue, reflecting the average rating and film rating. Unfortunately, these details disappear again once you’ve signed out or quit the app. It would be nice if the app could cache these details so that the app didn’t have to poll the NetFlix website so often.

Back on the pre-web description page, the app also allows you to rate your movies, which will update your movie ratings in your NetFlix account. No more need to respond to those “please rate this movie” emails!

Other tabs within the app include a list of recently rented movies, including the current one you have at home or in transit, a Search function to find you movies on NetFlix, your “For You” recommendations from NetFlix, and a Browse function to allow you to look through the available movies by name, genre, or the Top 100.

At the time of this writing, some of the features of the app had been disabled by changes in the NetFlix web site, but the developer has assured users that he is working on an update to fix this soon.

One of the nicer features the developer has added, but seems broken currently, is that he uses the accelerometer on the queue list page. At the top of the list is normally the next movie to be shipped out, but if you have a long list of movies in waiting and want to see them in reverse order, you can flip your iPhone/iPod Touch 180 degrees to “flip” the listing. This may not be the most efficient way to change the list order, but it’s more fun. Another simple, but very useful option is available when you click to add a movie to your queue. A dialog appears giving you the choice of adding the movie to the end of your queue or the beginning.

In my opinion, the app is a must have. I find myself getting movie recommendation from friends or thinking of movies I want to see out of the blue, and I love having this app at my fingertips to add items or change which movie ships out on a whim. I hardly ever go to the NetFlix web site anymore. I would love to see some kind of way to use the iPhone’s camera to scan movies to automatically add them to my list. Some apps are already doing this for books and other items. I’m not sure the developer has the kinds of resources needed for that, but something to think about eh?

Rockifone.com’s Flash Memory is a simple matching / concentration game. While the application is basic, it would be pretty good app for kids. The well done cartoon graphics and sound play well with kids. The game play itself works just as you would expect it to. There is a high score table which is nice.

This application is currently ad supported — even though the pictures in iTunes don’t show it, the ones below do.

CricketSong is an interesting app — one that combines some heavy duty audio analysis to do a rather simple thing — tell the temperature. You see, the frequency of the chirps of a cricket depends on the temperature. This is something straight out of the Farmers Almanac, but it really works according to Wikipedia.

CricketSong listens for the crickets, analyzes the sounds, and tells you the temperature. The unfortunate thing is that it’s winter here. Raining outside and cold. Not a cricket to be found. So while I wasn’t able to test it with real crickets, I was able to try it out with cricket sample sounds from http://buzz.ifas.ufl.edu/585a.htm.

Overall, an interesting app that’s doing some interesting work all hidden from the user. I can’t wait for spring to really test this out. Want to know more about why this works and how it’s done? Check out the developers home page here.

Multi Quiz is an Internet enabled iPhone multiple choice and multimedia trivia quiz application. The application allows you to download trivia quizzes from the Internet and play them on your iPhone. The trivia quizzes are more then just simple question and answers though — each question can include an image and/or a sound.

The most interesting feature though, in my opinion, is that you can create your own quizzes from the developers web site. Great possibilities here. You can make those custom quizzes public or private and send it to just friends.

The game is missing one main feature though — the ability to compare scores online. This is a feature that the developer is working on though and will be a welcome addition. Another feature that’s needed is the ability to report quizzes. The possibility is there for incorrect answers — and nothing pisses off a trivia geek more than that.

While Multi Quiz is not a bar trivia replacement, it is a great iPhone application. The nearly infinite quizzes — all user created — are a great feature that is undoubtedly going to lead to a bunch of great trivia quizzes coming soon.

Tarot is a fun little Tarot card reader for the iPhone. While I don’t want to offend any psychics out there, why would they be reading reviews, don’t they just know if the app is good? This is more of a party game than a serious tool, but it can be a fun party game.

The app offers 2 different modes — a guided reading that shows you various reading methods with card placements and the cards meanings. The second mode is more of a random pick a card kind of mode that is a more social card picker for random readings.

As entertainment at a party goes, this is a pretty cool ice-breaker / game app. The app is well created and easy to use.

Rave Light is an extremely simple application. It simply changes the color of the screen based on the position of the iPhone by using the accelerometer. And that’s it. There’s no UI, no customization, no interaction with the sound, just simple colors.

It does what it does I guess. If you are a raver, grab your pacifier and your iPhone with Rave Light and head to the warehouse. Otherwise, wait for something that does something more interesting.

Palmist is a little toy of an application that helps you understand the supposed meanings of the lines in your and, aka read your palm. You start off with the application by pressing the new reading button to take a picture of your right or left hand. The screen provides a nice overlay to show you where to position you hand. From there you can flip through pages with information on how to read the 3 lines in your hand, Head, Heart, and Life lines. The app does this only by overlaying example lines and explanatory text.

The down side to this app is that it doesn’t actually read your palm. There’s no image recognition going on to read the lines, it’s purely informational. And while it’s cheaper than having someone read your palm professionally, it’s not really worth the $2. That is of course unless it can help you pick up chicks….

Escape pod is an application with one purpose — to get you out of phone calls. The idea is simple, and except for hardware constraints, it’s well done.

The idea is that if you are on a phone call you want to get out of you launch Escape Pod, select a sound, and touch the escape pod on screen to play the sound. The included sounds are things like a baby crying, doorbell, etc. Hopefully that sound and a good job of verbal maneuvering will get you off the phone call.

The only real problem with this is the iPhone hardware issues. When you are on a call, the sound from this app only plays through the ear piece. While this can be picked up by the microphone, it’s really quiet even when turned up all the way. That said, the caller can still hear it unless you are in an already loud location — it just sounds muted. Perhaps this sounds more realistic anyway?

Update 10/2: as pointed out by the developer in the comments below, you can also use this with the speakerphone turned on. This makes a huge difference in the volume and makes it much easier to hear by the person on the other end of the call. Thanks for pointing this out! Rating increased.

If you are the kind of person who has the need to get out of a phone calls, this might be helpful. If you are cheap, you could always use the going out of cell range lie.

Sketches is an application that has been around since the early days of jailbroken 1.x iPhones. It has matured from a well designed but simple sketch based notepad to a real productivity tool. Standard drawing features include everything you would expect including multiple size/color drawing pens, text input, clip-art, and shapes. Additional cool features include the ability to pull in a background from the camera/photo library, from a web page, a solid color, or a map.

This latest version has fine-tuned the features and included some tips for usage in all the right places. In addition, memory usage features have been tuned to help keep the application from taking up too much memory and crashing.

Here are some the the uses that I’ve come up with that have saved me a lot of time:
- Pointing out needed web site changes — grab a web page and in Sketches, note needed change then email.
- Sending people directions — grab a map then add notation
- Adding clip art, cartoon balloons to a picture of a person for fun
- Sketch out site ideas / software feature ideas

Once you are done, you can save your creations back to your camera roll or post them to Twitter.com. In addition, this latest version includes web sharing. You can connect to your phone from a web browser and grab the images in JPG, PNG, or PDF format.

And you can do all of that on the go, on your iPhone. Nice indeed.

Sketches is a very nice and useful application. I’ve enjoyed it since the early days of jailbroken phones. It easily straddled the line between amazingly fun and wonderfully useful.

iChalky is a fun little toy and interesting thing to watch. The idea is a simple one and well executed. You have a stick figure on the screen — you can make him walk by turning your iPhone to the side — he will try to stay walking on all four edges of the screen. You can grab him at points and stretch him, drag him, even throw him up in the air. Responds well to multi-touch — you can grab him at up to 5 points and pull in opposite directions — act out your weird torture fantasies you perv. He bounces very nicely, btw.

iChalky also responds to music — he dances much better than I do — via the beats he hears over the built in microphone on the iPhone. Fun to just prop up somewhere and watch him dance to whatever music you are playing — might even make Jack Johnson tolerable. Nah, nothing could do that.

Here’s a short video produced by the developer showing you how iChakly moves and give a little explanation behind the physics of it.

iChakly isn’t an application that you will use to improve your productivity, but it is a fun little toy priced perfectly at $0.99.

Endless Walls is an application that displays a slideshow of wallpapers from Flickr and allows you to copy then to your camera roll for later use as wallpapers. The problem with this is that it looks like many of the images used in Endless Walls are copyrighted. Even though the images are loaded directly from the Flickr servers, this is still an application that ignores any sort of copyright or do not download settings the owner has set on their images. I’m not sure how I feel about this.

It would be easy enough to go to one of the Flickr groups that were created to index iPhone sized wallpaper images and download them directly to your iPhone in Mobile Safare. So is this application doing anything different? Well, yes. For one they are charging for the ability to do this. They are also ignoring the setting that the owner has set to keep people from downloading their images. Next, they are not even displaying any of the metadata for the photo such as who uploaded the photo, title, etc.

Another thing, they claim that there are over 7,000 wallpapers. Then why do I see so many duplicates? Inside the Endless Walls bundle, there is a file called cache.xml — while I’m not sure that this file contains all of the images used, it does contain only 2,000 unique URLs all pointing to Flickr.com image servers.

Motacore.com, the developers of Endless Walls were asked if they though their use of copyrighted images in this application was OK and this is their response:

That’s a very interesting point that our attorney may have overlooked. Thank you for bringing that to our attention. I will speak with our counsel as soon as he is available for a meeting.

While Flickr is currently one of our bigger sources, we are in the process of moving away from it to a user submitted (submitted to us) cache of wallpapers.

Way back in the pre-historic days, you know before the App Store, when there were other ways to get application on the iPhone, there was an application called Wallpaper, developed by Sean/Big Zaphod, who now works for Tapulous. It was a great and similar app but all of the wallpapers were user submitted directly from their iPhones. Seems like that is the direction that Motacore is heading. (And here’s hoping we’ll see an official version of Wallpaper, too!) Motacore is targeting the end of September, 2008 for this move. We’ll see how it goes.

So, in the end, I’m torn. This is a really easy application to grab new wallpapers on your iPhone, and fairly well developed. But legally and morally it just doesn’t seem right. So I’m going to have to leave this application at 0 stars. In the end you will need to make your own decision. Once they move to a user-generated and submitted version, we will re-visit it.

Developer: The Blimp Pilots
Price: $0.99
Version Reviewed: 1.0

Koi Pond is a simple little toy that could be my new favorite $0.99 app. It’s a fun little simulation of a koi pond with a few customization options. The customization options you have include the number of fish, the color of the water/background, and the number of plants in the pond. But wait, that’s not all! Act now and the pond is interactive. You can touch or drag across the screen to ripple the water on the pond. The fish are also interactive — touch near them to watch then scurry.

In all, this is a simple little app, but a fun toy. Give it a try. The only thing I can reduce the score for is that the sound is a little choppy — possibly due to too few samples.

The developers have posted this demo video of the 2.0 version — due soon in the App Store. This new version brightens the water a little and adds a few more things you can add to the pond.

Developer: Nico Becherer
Price: $1.99
Version Reviewed: 1.0

Face Melter is an image manipulation application. You take a picture either from your photo library or from the camera itself and manipulate it by moving your finger across the screen. It’s a simple little app that’s loads of fun!

The idea is pretty intuitive. You load or take a picture, then you push on it with your finger to move the pixels around — it gives the image a stretched appearance. The resulting images can vary from slightly odd — like increasing the size of an eye — to surreal (see the sample images below).

If you go too far, and you will know when that happens, there’s an undo feature. The undo button in the upper right can be toggled to reverse the changes. With this toggled when you drag your finger over the screen the pixels under your finger will move back to their original locations while maintaining a stretched appearance in the rest of the image.

Once you have your masterpiece you can save the image back to your image library for use as a contact image, background, or to email to someone.

Here’s a movie that shows you Face Melter in action:

This is an application that does what it says it’s going to do and does it well. Really enjoy this app. As you can see from the sample images below I had loads of fun with even the sample image. It’s great at parties and also for little kids.

Developer: Armin Heinrich
Price: $999.99
Version Reviewed: 1.0

Update 8/6: In what seems to becoming a common occurrence, I Am Rich has dissappeared from the iTunes App Store. It is no known at this time if the app was taken down by Apple (as many thought they should) or the developer.

Update 8/11: Added a video walkthrough — just for historic reasons.  Good to remember the first $1000 app even though it was a piece of sh*t.

Finally, the app we’ve all been waiting for. The application that everyone needs to show their true status in society. I Am Rich by Armin Heinrich.

I Am Rich is an application that showed up in the iTunes App Store at the amazing affordable price of $999.99. You read that correctly. On the surface, the author is positioning it as a status symbol. According to the description, the application itself does nothing except what you can see in the screenshot below. The description is that it is a work of art.

The application is a really good example of marketing — the author is obviously trying to get some PR for his other apps. I would have suggested he wait until he had more than one other app in the store though.

iBeer is a fairly well done little gag program that you can use to amuse your friends. While this is a fairly well done application, the fun is over quickly.

The idea of this is best explained in the demo movie below. Basically you are simulating drinking a beer from your iPhone / iPod Touch. The accelerometer is used to show the level of the beer — and the level goes down as you simulate a pour. Take a look:

You will soon find that everyone you know has seen this already. Still, it’s a fun little toy to play with. The price is a little high, but looks like the developers are still working on this — so who knows what’s in store.

Developer: Hottrix
Price: $2.99
Version Reviewed: 1.0

iMilk, like iBeer is a fairly well done little gag program that you can use to amuse your friends. While this is a fairly well done application, the fun is over quickly.

The idea of this is best explained in the demo movie below. Basically you are simulating drinking milk from your iPhone / iPod Touch. The accelerometer is used to show the level of the milk — and the level goes down as you simulate a pour. Take a look:

You will soon find that everyone you know has seen this already. Still, it’s a fun little toy to play with. The price is a little high for the amount of time you will end up using it.

Developer: EZone.com
Price: $0.99
Date Listed in App Store: 7/27/2008
Version Reviewed: 1.0

Crazy Mouth and Crazy Eye are a couple simple little toys to annoy the heck out of people with. Well, maybe they are just fun for little kids to play with. The idea is straightforward launch one of the two, select the mouth or eye that you want to play and then hold it up to your face. See the YouTube videos below for a demo.

Crazy Mouth

Crazy Eye

The animations used in both are clean and of good quality as are the sounds. For 99 cents each these are worth picking up one or both.